44th Parl. 1st Sess.
September 19, 2024 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to take part in the debate today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
I find this to be a fascinating debate. We are debating concurrence in a committee report that says that the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities recognizes Canada is in a housing crisis that requires urgent action by the federal government to end homelessness and that this motion be reported to the House. We are talking about it being a crisis that requires urgent action.
It was interesting to hear the exchange between the Liberal member and the NDP earlier. The Liberal member for Winnipeg North in particular was complaining about the fact that we were discussing this today. He consistently complains about these things. He referred to Bill C-66 and made an urgent call for us to get back to that. I know all parties support the bill. It has been before the House for over 180 days. We sat until midnight virtually every night in the spring and the government did not bring the bill forward. We did not have the conversation, so it was not urgent at that point in time. Our shadow minister has signalled that we support this. We recognize that there are some things all parties in the House support, and that bill is one of them. Hopefully it will be a priority for the government and will pass very soon.
I believe this report also passed unanimously, recognizing the crisis situation and the urgent need to have conversations.
The wording and type of language is very familiar. In the Liberal 2015 platform, close to a decade ago, the Liberals said:
We will conduct an inventory of all available federal lands and buildings that could be repurposed, and make some of these lands available at low cost for affordable housing in communities where there is a pressing need.
About a decade ago, and recognizing the similarity in wording, the Liberals promised to make this a priority and recognized that there was a “pressing need”.
Nine years later, in the 2024 budget, the Liberals almost used identical wording. They talked about the federal government conducting a “rapid review” of its entire federal land portfolio to identify more land for housing. That was an active sentence, that the federal government is conducting a rapid review. I guess “rapid”, by the Liberal definition, is nine years for something urgent, and the situation has only become worse.
I found it really interesting to listen to the NDP interventions on this, particularly that of the member for New Westminster—Burnaby, who talked about the current government and how terrible it was, forgetting the fact that up until two weeks ago he was, for all intents and purposes, a part of the Liberal government through the Liberal-NDP coalition. I will note that, as terrible a fiscal situation as we were in in 2021, when the NDP joined the Liberal Party, things only got dramatically worse for Canadians after it joined the then completely incompetent Liberal government. We are sitting in a situation right now where rents, down payments and mortgage payments have doubled. Canadians who have mortgages coming due right now, after five years, are going to, without a corresponding increase in their income and their ability to pay, be paying hundreds of dollars, in some cases over $1,000 more, in their monthly mortgage payments without any increase in their income. The NDP members have supported the situation that has gotten us to this place, this predicament right now, every single step of the way for the last three years.
There has been a lot of talk about the Harper years. I was a part of that government from 2006 to 2015. I had the privilege of serving on the cabinet subcommittee that looked at ways to get the budget back to balance, which we did by 2015.
However, I would go back to the situation in 2014. There was a pretty interesting conversation going on, driven by the New York Times and some international research institutes. They found that in 2014-15, Canada had the richest middle class in the world. I am sure there were challenges for some Canadians, but, by and large, we were in a better fiscal situation than any country in the world. Even people like Hillary Clinton were lamenting this in conversations in some of the articles that were written at the time. Experts from around the world were pointing to Canada as an example of how to deal with a difficult financial situation coming out of the global meltdown. That was in 2014.
Let us fast forward 10 years to 2024. We are no longer the richest middle class in the world. Our middle class is, as a percentage of our population, by all measures, contracting. Regular people, people who never, ever even contemplated the fact that they would need to use a food bank, are now lining up at food banks with their kids in cities across Canada.
Let us look at the situation we are in again, and listen to the NDP talk about the housing crisis and where we are right now relative to the past. This crisis did not exist in the same way in 2015. Let us look at cities across the country. Housing starts in August were down 13%. At this time, when we need to be building houses, housing starts are down 13% across the country.
I would note that in the Liberal member's city of Winnipeg, housing starts are down 16% from August 2023. In B.C., under the provincial NDP government, housing starts are down an astonishing 31%. In Vancouver, which is very close to New Westminster, where the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby is from and represents, housing starts are down 34%. In Toronto, under the leadership of a former NDP member of Parliament, Olivia Chow, housing starts are down 48% over the last year. Those are just astonishing drops in housing starts across the country.
We have a real crisis. I think all parties have recognized that this is a crisis and that we need to deal with it urgently now.
One member of Parliament in the House has been dealing with this issue right from the start. That member of Parliament is our Conservative leader. In 2021, at the start of the pandemic and the explosive additional spending by the Liberal government, which was eventually propped up by the NDP, he brought up the effect of the increase in interest rates over and over again. He was mocked for bringing it up by the finance minister and by the Prime Minister on a regular basis.
A year ago tomorrow, we were talking about a private member's bill that our leader had put forward, a bill that would deal with the housing crisis in an urgent way, in a common-sense way. I will not have time to read all the highlights of that bill, entitled the “Building Homes, Not Bureaucracy Act”. Canadians can look that up on ourcommons.ca. However, I will point out that when we put out this common-sense, good-faith bill to get more houses built in Canada, every non-Conservative member of the House, Liberal members, along with members from the Bloc and NDP, voted against that private member's bill that would have created significant action toward housing over the last year.
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- Sep/19/24 12:22:28 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, again, the situation we are in right now is infinitely worse than the situation a decade ago.
We are sitting in a situation where, in the member's province, run by an NDP government, housing starts in the middle of a housing crisis are down 31% over the last year. We can go back a decade in history, but what is probably more relevant to this conversation is the last three or four years in which the NDP and Liberals have worked together to create the absolute crisis that demands urgent action right now.
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- Sep/19/24 12:23:11 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the good people of Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
Rents are up, unemployment is up, food bank usage is up and time is up. Who tells us this? The Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, which I have sat on in previous Parliaments, does. In its study on the housing crisis in Canada, it says, “That the Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities recognizes that Canada is in a housing crisis that requires urgent action by the federal government to end homelessness, and that this motion be reported to the House”, which is why we are here today discussing this. I am going to cover three areas where I think we need to start looking at this.
The word “crisis” actually stems from a Greek word that essentially means to cut away. It means that of all the different choices we have, a crisis is meant to actually cut away from certain choices and stick to other ones. Unfortunately the current government is listless. It talks around the issue of housing. It says that it will create housing, but really the Government of Canada does not create housing. It can help finance it through CMHC insurance. It can use its fiscal power, which the current government knows because it is the only power it seems to want to use.
However, the Liberals have not convened the provinces to have big discussions around development cost charges reform or about zoning reform. They have chosen not to. Instead, they have sprinkled money at the problem, and as the previous member who spoke, the member for Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, said, they have simply decided that they would do a review of existing lands and try to see whether they could do more to give lands, but they are not telling whom they would give the lands to.
It is actually developers who largely provide housing, but as the member previous said, we have seen a drop in places like British Columbia, where I am from, of over 30% in the last year in housing starts when we need them the most. The member is right; the David Eby government has largely failed on this issue since he took office. He had 100 days of action, and unfortunately, like the Prime Minister, he has floundered on the issue.
The three areas I am going to talk about are what we need to do a better job on, which is for workers, seniors and youth.
First I will talk about workers. I am from the Okanagan. I am very proud to represent three different valleys, but the Okanagan is known not just for its peaches and beaches, great wine or golf courses, but also largely for its retirement communities. There are a significant number of people who retire there for the weather and for the natural beauty. However, the problem I have noticed is that people who have money, especially when they cash out from Calgary, Vancouver, or some other place, often move to the Okanagan to live out their retirement.
As we get older, the question we have to ask ourselves in the Okanagan, particularly because there is very much a housing crunch, is this: Who is going to look after people as they age? Where are the younger doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers and the support staff for many of the services seniors require going to live?
People with money always land on their feet, so I have encouraged every council that I know, and every mayor, to work on purpose-built rentals. I have to give the Kelowna multiple councils a big thumbs-up because they have done a lot of purpose-built rentals. However, it is not enough. I hear regularly, from tech employers to others in the industrial area, such as welders, etc., that they cannot keep welders and tech operators because there are very few places to rent. No one wants to stay in a community long-term, even as beautiful as Kelowna can be, or West Kelowna, if they cannot secure a home. Workers are being let down by both the Eby government in British Columbia and the Liberal government here in Ottawa.
The other side for workers is because of the problem of gatekeeping in this economy. We know that many municipalities have made it difficult to build.
Lots of people want to live in places like Victoria. Where do they end up? They go to places like Langford, where a lot of housing has been built to accommodate the demand. It is the gatekeepers in communities that make it harder. What are they gatekeeping? They are not just gatekeeping the homes that people will eventually live in; they are also gatekeeping the investment of billions of dollars that would be put into our economy and would allow workers to then be able to build homes. It would support the people who work in mills like Aspen Planers or the Weyerhaeuser mill in Princeton and Merritt, respectively.
There would be benefits to our economy, such as realtors and lawyers as they do some of the conveyancing. There would be so many knock-off effects in a place like British Columbia. The problem is that the government does not see the economic opportunity, nor does the provincial government see that the skilled trades have a huge opportunity to grow in this area. We are letting existing workers down because they cannot stay in places like Kelowna or West Kelowna, or if they can, they find short-term rentals, with no chance of ownership.
We are also letting down seniors. I will give an example because the particularly concurrence report before us speaks to homelessness. There have been renovictions in places like British Columbia. Why is that? It is because property values have gone up and because mortgage rates have gone up. People have bought homes, investing all of their sweat and equity, and rented them, and due to the government's policies, they have seen inflation and interest rates rise. Those go up and down, but we cannot negate the fact that people make economic decisions.
Many people have said they cannot afford a variable mortgage or to remortgage, so they sell. One senior did that and was living in her car at Tim Hortons. Someone asked me whether I could help that person. I went to that particular Tim Hortons three times at different times of the day, but I did not see the individual. Eventually, though, I gave information to the senior to help connect her with social services in British Columbia. However, she would have to drive to a place like Penticton because places like Summerland and other areas in the Similkameen Valley and the Nicola Valley do not have the same kinds of supports that are in bigger urban centres like Kelowna or West Kelowna.
By governments' not allowing more building, seniors do not have affordable places to rent right now. The NDP likes to say we should get not-for-profits to build more housing, or get government to build more housing, or co-ops or whatnot. However, those take a long time to form, and guess what, they are in the same queue, waiting behind the same people, because everyone is begging under the same bridge, so to speak, to get their approvals to be able to proceed under the gatekeeping economy.
The last thing I would like to talk about is youth. Partisanship aside, if we do not show young people in this country that they have the same opportunities that their parents and grandparents had to find a place that they can call home, that they can invest in and raise a family in, they will feel shut out by our economic system. There is a danger in that, because if we do not show that our current system works for young people, that they are not locked out from pride of ownership, then what will they do? They will go to radical voices that will promise them the moon and the stars, and then that will create all sorts of chaos, I believe.
This country, yes, feels broken to many, especially young people. The leader of my party, the member for Carleton, has been speaking to them directly, saying that we must do better. Not everyone in the room may like what the member of Parliament for Carleton has to say all the time, but I hope members get the message, because we need to do better, particularly for the next generation of Canadians, so they can have the same opportunities that we had.
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- Sep/19/24 12:51:06 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, the mortgage crisis, despite what the Liberals will tell us, was caused by them. They allowed the bank governor to jack up the money supply by 23%, and the $600 billion in cash printed spiked inflation. It was not the war in Ukraine that caused inflation. It was not supply chains. It was the watering down of the value of our currency that spiked inflation, which directly led to this mortgage crisis. Now, on top of the affordability problems and on top of everything else, we will start to see people lose their homes. It is catastrophic and very sad.
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- Sep/19/24 2:14:38 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to highlight the amazing work of the Mobile Youth Services Team, or MYST, and in particular its crime reduction and exploitation diversion program.
It has been serving at-risk youth in our region for over 20 years. It is tackling online sexual and gang exploitation, and the intersecting crises of the toxic drug supply, mental health issues, poverty and homelessness. It has an extremely effective program with an incredible success rate, where it proactively engages with youth and their families to provide support and key referrals.
Currently, there is one MYST team that is handling over 250 active cases of youth in crisis. We know the frequency of youth being targeted by sexual predators and for gang recruitment has been increasing, and calls to the team have ballooned. It has applied to the Department of Justice, because despite the high demand it recently had to reduce the hours of its program to only two days a week. Without new funding, it faces the prospect of closing as early as March 2025.
MYST teams have an incredible impact, and this model could be replicated across the country. The loss of this program would be devastating, given the need in our community—
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- Sep/19/24 3:15:07 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, communities across the country are in crisis. They do not have the resources they need to support people who are struggling with trauma, mental health and substance use disorders, but the Liberals keep delaying support.
Today, the Nuu-chah-nulth nations declared a state of emergency. They are pleading for federal help. This comes after every single substance use and addictions program application that they applied for was denied.
What more will it take for the Liberals to finally provide the mental health resources that these nations desperately need?
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